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Heedless Love Meets Iciness

"Eugene Onegin": Anna Netrebko as Tatiana at the Vienna State Opera. She will reprise the role at the Met this fallCredit
Michael Phn/Wiener Staatsoper

VIENNA — Anna Netrebko was clearly a Tatiana waiting to happen in Tchaikovsky’s resplendent opera “Eugene Onegin.” The only question is why it took so long.

Ms. Netrebko, who opened the last two seasons at the Metropolitan Opera in works by Donizetti, will kick off the Met’s 2013-14 season in September with Tatiana in a new production directed by Deborah Warner and conducted by Valery Gergiev. But Ms. Netrebko is now gracing the stage of the Vienna State Opera with her first performances of the role in a production by Falk Richter. To judge from her outing on Monday, New Yorkers have much to look forward to, though she will be the only major part of this production to make the trip.

Mr. Richter’s modern-dress concept — cold, cold, cold — was fascinating. It blurred the distinctions between indoors and outdoors, and so, presumably, between the winter of nature and the winter of the soul.

The backdrop for most of the opera consisted of snowfall and lightly dressed couples embracing. At the point when the worldly hard Onegin rejects the love-smitten innocent Tatiana, the male in each couple drifted away. In the foreground, indoors, the furniture resembled nothing so much as blocks of ice, including a large squarish frame, built igloo-like.

Best of all, none of it got in the way of the singing from an excellent cast (though Ms. Netrebko did have to sing a phrase lying flat on her back). The baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, familiar in the role of Onegin at the Metropolitan Opera, was his typical imposing self: so imposing that his meltdown in the end, as a belatedly enlightened (or at least intensely lonely) Onegin, may have strained credulity a bit.

As Lensky — the poet, Onegin’s friend, and ultimately his victim in a duel — Dmitry Korchak was slow to impress. He sang initially with a kind of brassiness common among Russian tenors but eventually settled into a beauty of tone and an identification with character that had the crowd at his feet.

Still, this was essentially Ms. Netrebko’s show, and everyone knew it. She was wonderful. Her letter scene in the first act, a naïf’s heedless confession of love to an unfeeling Onegin, developed slowly but ended in an outpouring of gorgeous sound and heartfelt emotion that few could match today, none so idiomatically.

The ovation was long and loud, and Ms. Netrebko, to her credit, did not break character, keeping her head buried in her arms. But she did bathe in the adulation of the curtain calls at the intermission (only one, after two long acts) and at the end, waved happily to the crowd.

At times in the first act, the stage action fell a little behind the conductor, Andris Nelsons, and Mr. Nelsons let the orchestra override the singers at times. But who wouldn’t, given the great Vienna State Opera Orchestra? As always, that ensemble played with great character — not Russian character, necessarily, but great character nonetheless.

“Eugene Onegin” runs through Monday at the Vienna State Opera; wiener-staatsoper.at.

A version of this review appears in print on April 19, 2013, on page C8 of the New York edition with the headline: Heedless Love Meets Iciness. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe